This October is pure lunacy. I mean, we've got a friggin' Rockies-Red Sox World Series, a matchup that would have garnered nothing more than a, "What are you, retarded?" look were it forecasted just a few years ago, Joe Torre figuratively flipping the Yankees the bird and going out like a real a-hole, Dane Cook screaming at me from rapidly changing camera angles when I'm just trying to relax and watch some baseball, and the seventh damn year in a row the Yankees have failed to win a World Series title despite being by far the best team in baseball over that stretch.
I have to say, the media coverage of the Joe Torre debacle has been the most infuriating element of this hurricane of insanity. It's as if every beat writer has completely lost their mind. Maybe they're just bewitched. Who knows? Maybe Joe Torre is a witch. Regardless of whether he's a witch or not, here are a few things I know about Joe Torre:
1) He is a horrible baseball tactician. Notice I've initially stopped short of saying the word "manager", because whenever anyone dares to call him a bad manager, they are subjected to an avalanche of absurd claims along the lines of, "BUT HE MANAGES THE PERSONALITIES OF HIS PLAYERS SO WELL!!!!!11111". Let's refute this statement with two important points:
- It's irrelevant. I am sick and tired of the idea that a professional player's performance is somehow tied to how their personality is being "managed". Do you really think A-Rod is going up the plate thinking, "Well, normally I wouldn't even try here, but since Joe Torre has managed my personality so well, I'm just going to go ahead and hit a 450-foot home run." No. His thought process is more likely, "Okay, this guy threw me first-pitch fastballs the last two at-bats, so he's probably coming with the hook to start me off here. I'll lay off it and hopefully be sitting at 1-0. Then I'll hit a 450-foot home run which will further contribute to the hundreds of millions of dollars I'll be guaranteed this offseason. Man I rule."
- It's UNTRUE. Oh, so Joe Torre is skilled at managing the personalities of big-time mercenary-like players stuffed into one New York clubhouse, you say? Wow, that's interesting. Maybe you'd like to explain why Randy Johnson hated playing for this team, Carl Pavano picked up his check and checked out, and Gary Sheffield is off spewing crap about how the Yankees are racist. Torre was supposed to be able to handle these maniacs that the Yankees were paying tens of millions of dollars to every year, and he failed miserably.
2) He is outrageously overpaid. Consider that this season, Joe was paid $7.5 million, MORE THAN TWICE WHAT THE NEXT HIGHEST-PAID MANAGER MADE. I find this hilarious because I think paying him anything at all would constitute overpaying, because he puts his team at a competitive disadvantage through his bad managing. He literally subtracts expected wins from the team he manages and gets paid CEO-type money to do it. He's the freakin' Kenneth Lay of baseball. So why haven't the Yankees pulled an Enron and completely tanked during his tenure, then? Because relatively speaking, there is very little baseball managers can do to affect their team's performance. You could literally put a monkey in a Yankees uniform and staple-gun a depth chart to his back and he would be just as effective as Joe Torre. Hell, the monkey might even beat him in the long-run. If you actually wanted to help your team, though, you could write a computer program that would undoubtedly out-tactician Torre, and probably any other manager.
3) He is a miserable fat sloth. Am I the only person who noticed how he would constantly be fighting to stay awake during games? They'd cut to the bench, and there he'd be, a little pile of fat, barely moving and his eyes drooping down.
4) He most certainly doesn't understand what expected value is. If he did, he'd realize that the contract the Yankees offered him was not much of a pay cut. If you consider the Yankees a shoo-in to the make the playoffs and then a coinflip to win each playoff series, the EV of his base salary plus incentives is [5+(1)(1)+(.5)(1)+(.25)(1)] = $6.75 million. Oh no, a 10% pay cut! Now instead of having ten Ferraris to sit his fat ass in, he can only get nine! A 10% pay cut after failing to bring home a World Series title for seven years with what is consistently the best team in baseball is obviously acceptable.
God I hate Dane Cook.